The present invention relates to a protective enclosure for a splice connection between respective wires of two cables.
There are many situations in which it is necessary to directly connect, or splice, the wires of one cable to respective wires of another cable, in which case the individual dual splice connections must be electrically insulated from one another and fron the external environment. As a result, a wide variety of arrangements for producing this result have already been proposed. Many such proposals include the use of heat-shrinkable tubing of electrical insulating material which is placed around each splice connection and then heated to be firmly secured to the insulation associated with the connected wires while enclosing the connection itself with a layer of electrical insulating material.
However, situations exist where the use of such tubing, by itself, is inadequate. This is the case, for example, when it is necessary to splice the conductors of a mineral insulated hardline cable to those of an organic softline cable in a nuclear power plant containment structure. The environmental, aging, accident and postaccident conditions for which provisions must be made in such an installation impose requirements which cannot be met simply by the use of heat-shrinkable tubing, or by other known splice enclosure solutions.
In such an installation, it is necessary that the spliced conductor ends be insulated against beta radiation, which is the major cause of material degradation. At the same time, the region in which the cables are connected together should be flexible and it should be possible to make such a splice connection in situ.